Justice secretary to meet Sentencing Council after stand-off over alleged ‘differential treatment’ rules – UK politics live | Politics

In the Commons Jonathan Hinder (Lab) said he was shocked by the tone of the letter released by the Sentencing Council last night. He said that “we’ve given too much power away to these unelected bodies in recent years” and that he would back the government in restoring “equality before the law”.

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, confirmed that she was willing to change the law if necessary to get the guidelines changed.

In the Commons Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, is asking Shabana Mahmood about the Sentencing Council’s decision to refuse her request to change what he described as its “two-tier guidance”.

Jenrick says Mahmood briefed the papers that she was “incandescent”. Was she incandescent about her offficials, or about her failure to read the papers about what the Sentencing Council was proposing.

In response, Mahmood accuses Jenrick of “amnesia”, saying he has forgotten that the last Conservative government approved the guidelines. She refers to the letter from Richard Bacon, when he was a Tory justice minister, confirming this. She says there has only been a “minor change” from the wording approved by Bacon and the text published last week.

In his follow-up question, Jenrick says the new guidance is coming into force in 21 days’ time. Accusing Mahmood of being “too lazy to do her job”, he says the Tories have done it for her and he says he has prepared a bill that would block these new guidelines. He challenges Mahmood to say the government will back it.

In response, Mahmood says she has been very clear.

We will never stand for a two-tier approach to sentencing, but I am actually getting on with fixing the problem, rather than looking for a bandwagon to jump on. That is why I have already written to the Sentencing Council. I will be meeting with them later in this week, and I have made it very clear I will consider their role and their powers, and if I need to legislate, I will do so.

But I will make sure that whatever changes I bring forward are workable and they deliver the fair justice system that we all need and deserve, and one his government did not deliver.

At the parliamentary Labour party meeting last night, Keir Starmer strongly defended the government’s plans to cut sickness and disability benefits, saying the current system is the “worst of all worlds”. Jessica Elgot and Patrick Butler have the full story here.

But Starmer’s plans are bound to fail, according to John McTernan, who was political secretary to Tony Blair when he was PM and who worked as a special adviser to Harriet Harman when, as social security secretary, she tried to cut disability benefits.

In an interview with the i, McTernan said it was hard for any government to take on the disability sector. He said:

The one lobby that defeated Tony Blair’s welfare reforms wasn’t lone parents – their cut went through despite a massive rebellion. It was disability cuts which were ditched once they were floated. The disability lobby is massive and influential because disability itself is distributed widely across the country.

He also said that the government was “foolishly and dangerously confusing the categories of long-term sickness and disability” with“no coherent case for change”.

He added:

Labour tested the public’s patience when it took winter fuel payments from 10m pensioners with no warning. It risks losing support for the benefit cuts it is trailing.

Around a third of Reform UK voters think the party would be doing better if Nigel Farage were replaced as leader, a YouGov poll suggests.

The Israeli government has been told that it has obligations under international humanitarian law to allow free and unimpeded access to aid to Gaza, a Foreign Office minister has said.

As PA Media reports, Hamish Falconer told the foreign affairs committee this morning that “limited progress” had been made in urging the Israeli government to lift “far-reaching” restrictions in order to help people deal with colder conditions in winter.

He said that Israel had claimed that some items were “dual use”, meaning they could be used for both civilian and military purposes. This includes tents “because the claim is that the poles could be used as weaponry”, sleeping bags “because they’re said to be in camouflage colours,” and water purification units “because there’s some fear that they could be used for some other purpose”.

Falconer said:

The nature of the dual-use restrictions that Israel has imposed have been so far-reaching as to make … providing the aid required to help people respond to the colder conditions of winter very, very difficult indeed.

It was a question very much on our minds as winter came in Gaza, and it was an issue on which we made limited progress.

Asked whether he could confirm it had been “impressed upon the Israeli government that they have an obligation under international humanitarian law to allow the free and unimpeded access of aid to Gaza,” he said: “I can.”

In an interview with Sky News, Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, said the Conservatives would support the government if it decided to change the law to force the Sentencing Council to withdraw its alleged “differential treatment” rules. (See 10.56am.) He said:

I don’t want to live in a world where ministers are deciding any individual sentence, to be clear. But overall policy, the balance between rights, the values that we have in society, is the domain of elected politicians.

And frankly, I want if it needs legislation, then we will support that. But it should never have got to this.

Asked about reports confirming that Gareth Bacon, a justice minister in the last Conservative government, approved the guidelines that his party is now opposing, Griffith claimed that a large number of ministers and officials were involved in the decision. He said he was blaming “a system that needs fundamental reform” because arms-length bodies like the Sentencing Council had too much power.

The ousted Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe could join forces in a breakaway rightwing party with a former deputy leader of the party who was also forced out by Nigel Farage, Jessica Elgot and Ben Quinn report.

Ministers have revived their threat to legislate to curb the powers of the Sentencing Council after it refused the government’s request to withdraw guidelines allegedly favourable to minorities.

Speaking on behalf of the government on the morning interview round, Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, said the government did not support “differential treatment” and that it would legislate to get its way if necessary.

He also said Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, would be meeting the Sentencing Council on Thursday to discuss the stand-off.

The council, which is independent of government, published the new guidelines last week after a long consultation period during which the last government, and the current government, raised no objections to what was being proposed. But, after the Tories claimed the new guidelines would amount to “two-tier justice”, Mahmood in effect said she agreed, and she called for the guidelines to be withdrawn.

Yesterday the council replied with a letter saying it was “completely wrong” to say the new guidelines will lead to sentencing policy favouring minorities. It said some minority ethnic offenders receive harsher sentences than equivalent white offenders, and the new guidelines would make the system fairer.

In his letter Lord Justice William Davis, chair of the council, suggested that in this case the justice secretary does not have the legal power to call for sentening guidelines to be revised because they have only just been published, following consultation with her department. He said he would be taking legal advice to clarify this.

And, if the government tried changing the law to give itself powers to rewrite the guidelines, it would be undermining the independent of the judiciary, he suggested.

But Pennycook implied the government is willing to change the law anyway to get the rules changed. Asked about the story, he told LBC:

We’ve been very clear on our position on this matter. We think everyone’s equal before the law. We don’t agree with differential treatment, regardless of anyone’s background, and the justice secretary has made her views very well known.

We don’t agree with the policy. We’ve asked the Sentencing Council to rethink and rescind the guidance. They’ve obviously replied to the justice secretary yesterday evening. She has a meeting with him later this week where she’ll press her case.

But we’ve been very clear that we won’t hesitate to act through legislation if required.

Yesterday the government announced that, under measures in the planning and infrastructure bill, people living near new electricity pylons, or other new power infrastructure, could be given £250 a year off their energy bills.

In an interview with Times Radio this morning, Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, said this discount scheme would mean overall bills for consumers being a bit higher than they otherwise would be. But he said it would just mean average bills going up by between 80p and £1.50 per year. He said:

[The discount scheme] will be put as an obligation on energy suppliers, and will be made up in the bills of households across the country. But we are talking extremely small amounts. We expect between 80p and £1.50 per year.

And over the long run, because we are deploying more renewable energy, more homegrown, clean energy, the cost of everyone’s bills will come down.

Ben Quinn is a senior Guardian reporter.

Rupert Lowe’s seven-strong team at Westminster and his constituency office have put out a statement in their own names to back him and claim that processes designed to protect staff had been “weaponised” in a “malicious fashion.” They are defending the MP after he was suspended by Reform UK over alleged misconduct – allegations that Lowe claims have been contrived because he poses a political threat to the party’s leader, Nigel Farage.

A statement in the name of the five staff in parliament and two in Lowe’s constituency office of Great Yarmouth was posted on the MP’s X account this morning.

In it, the staff said they had felt obliged to take the unusual step of publishing the statement and that their employer had no involvement in organising or drafting it.

Describing Lowe as a “decent, and honest man,” they said that wider allegations of bullying were untrue. They said:

We are all uncomfortable to see processes designed to protect staff weaponised in such an unpleasant and malicious fashion.

Not just tarnishing Rupert’s name unfairly, but also our office and subsequently us. Nobody from Reform has ever raised these concerns, or any about Rupert, with any of us before this ‘investigation’. If they were so concerned about Rupert’s behaviour why were we not warned?

Good morning. The government’s planning and infrastructure bill is being published later today, and in an article for the Times Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, claims it will be “a major step forward in getting Britain building again”. The measures in the legislation have already been well publicised and Rayner sums them up like this.

A new road for Norwich was set to make life easier for 44,000 homeowners, speeding up journeys to East Anglia’s biggest hospital and creating 33,000 new jobs. But it was delayed by spurious legal challenges for two years until the case was dismissed as having no logical basis. This government gave it the green light last week.

The many organisations that must be consulted in the planning process are also putting up unnecessary obstacles. A row over balls hit from a cricket club has delayed 139 new flats in Bradford. The wait for a development consent order increased by 65 per cent between 2012 and 2021. It now takes around four years to get a decision on major infrastructure.

That will change, thanks to our new planning and infrastructure bill. As part of our Plan for Change, we’re fast-tracking decisions for more than 150 major infrastructure projects this parliament …

We will streamline consultation requirements for projects such as roads and railway lines while keeping them robust. Wind and solar projects will be prioritised for grid connections, helping us achieve clean power by 2030, with those living within 500 metres of new pylons given up to £250 a year off their electricity bills.

And we’re fixing a system that both stops development going ahead and fails to protect our habitats and species. Developers will pay into a Nature Restoration Fund which Natural England experts can use to achieve better outcomes.

The bill itself will be published later today.

Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, has been giving interviews this morning to promote it, and he has had to respond to a fresh line of attack from opponents of the legislation that has made the Telegraph splash. The government has been saying for some time that it wants to give councils in England the powers to acquire land for housebuilding via compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) at market prices without having to pay “hope value” – what the land would be worth assuming planning permission for housing were granted. The Telegraph story presents this as a fresh Labour attack on farmers. It quotes Tim Bonner from the Countryside Alliance as saying:

We have been supportive of many of the Government’s changes to planning policy, but giving councils more power to reduce the value of land is a step too far, especially in the context of such a challenging outlook for farmers and the inheritance tax fiasco.

This is not about people blocking development, it’s about the state paying the market price for land. We need more houses and more economic development, but not at the cost of basic principles.

In his interviews Pennycook did not challenge the facts of the story. He told LBC the government was giving councils the power to disapply “hope value” in a compulsory purchase acquisition “where there’s a site with a significant public interest involved, higher affordable levels of housing, for example, or health and education facilities”. But he said this was not aimed at farmers.

We are obviously and very clearly not setting out to target agricultural land. The land use framework we’re consulting on currently will ensure that prime agricultural land is protected, and food security is protected.

I see this power being used in particular, to much greater effect – and that’s where I want to see it come forward – specifically in urban areas, on previously developed brownfield land where regeneration projects with a significant public interest can be unlocked more easily.

When he was asked to admit that the Telegraph was right to say farmers could be affected, Pennycook said he did not think the Telegraph was right – “and it’s not often right, I must say” – because the final decision would rest with the local authority. Ministers would not be saying that prime agricultural land should be sold, he said.

Asked about the same issue on the Today programme, Pennycook said that he was “somewhat mystified that the Telegraph have looked through our CPO powers through the lens of farmers and prime agricultural land” when he expected them to be used mostly “for regeneration projects on previously developed brownfield land in urban centres”.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer to chair cabinet.

11.30am: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: MPs start debating the remaining stages of the employment rights bill.

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